The Great Mother. The Heart of the World.

Tatiana Calixto, 2011

In the beginning, all was darkness and water. There was no land, no sun or moon, and nothing alive. The water was the Great Mother. She was the mind within nature, the fountain of all possibilities. 

At the first dawning, the Great Mother began to spin her thoughts. In her serpent form she placed an egg into the void, and the egg became the universe. The universe was to have nine layers. Four of the nether world and four of the upper world; with the plane of contact being the fifth, the central world of human beings.

The universe was still soft. The Great Mother stabilized it by thrusting her enormous spindle into the center, penetrating the nine layers of the world axis. The Lords of the Universe, born of the Great Mother, pushed back the sea and lifted up the Sierra Nevada around the world axis.  […]  From her spindle uncoiled a length of cotton thread with which she traced a circle around the mountains, circumscribing the Sierra Nevada, which she declared to be the land of her children. Thus the spindle became a model of the cosmos. The disk is the earth, the whorl of yarn is the territory of the people, the individual strands of spun cotton are the thoughts of the sun. The white cone of yarn represents the four layers of the upper world, but below the disk the cotton is black and invisible. The sun in moving around the earth spins the yarn of life and gathers it about the axis of the cosmos, the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the homeland of the Great Mother.

Wade Davis.  One River.  Simon & Schuster, 1997

Reproduced with permission of the author

Zarwatun’s Bridge: The Arhuaco Photo Exhibit  |  Ann Arbor, Michigan  |  Contact:  tcalixto@umich.edu

2011–2014